This past New York Comic-Con weekend apparently got picked as Mode Reveal Weekend in the Capcom corporate offices. We saw Gem Mode revealed in Street Fighter x Tekken on Friday and then got word of the Heroes and Heralds Mode in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

As divulged by producer Ryoji Niitsuma , it'll be a free mode, out after the game launches, which builds in a CCG element to the fighting action. With each fight you win, you'll get cards that let you use powers you wouldn't normally have, like projectile invincibility. When the crowd went crazy watching Ryu use a Parry ability in the trailer, it was later revealed that Parry will be only available in Heroes & Heralds mode as a card move. In Heroes and Heralds, players can form clans and battle with others and Capcom's Seth Killian hinted that characters from Power Stone or Breath of Fire games might show up as art on collectible cards in H&H mode. There'll be over 100 cards used in combinations of three—which opponnents will be allowed to see-that will total out to 1.2 million configuration combinations.

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While the basic premise of the card tweaks in H&H Mode aren't all that different from SFxT's Gem Mode, the former got a much warmer reception during its unveiling. When I asked Killian why he thought that might be he said that one's being seen as serious strategic business whereas the other's being thought of as a way to propagate cheesiness. We'll see how differently they get used when Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 comes out in November and Street Fighter x Tekken hits next March.